Well, we hadn't been there very long at all when Clair assessed the roadside peeing situation as being poor.
As much as she was willing to anoint the scrub, she quickly saw that there was really nowhere to do so without being in full view 20 pairs of bored eyes.
The wait had obviously already been so long that people were getting out to stretch their legs and walking between cars anyway.
People were providing each other with water, chatting, getting things from the boot and so forth.
Not your usual traffic jam.
This was much more interactive.
What scrub there was by the side of the road was pitiful at best, and in plain view.
Even men were struggling to get away with anything, which serves them right anyway.
And yet those icey poles wanted out.
So, faced with an emergency, Clair went into survival mode.
And it was magnificent to watch.
"I'll pee in something and just throw it out," she said.
But what?
Together we pulled the place apart, searching for something appropriate - we needed something the right size and shape...
But what is the right size and shape for the average piddle?
Are we talking a cup, a litre, a handbag? I dunno. How much do we pee in one go?
I tried to think back to my geriatric nursing days, but they were all on drugs. And we never served icey poles.
At some stage, one of us found a pink metal gingerbread tin which housed my ribbons and such.
Yes! Perfect. You could easily fit a twat over that, and it should hold a very decent sized piss too.
I was ready to turn my head discreetly and create a distraction while she did what she needed to...
Good thing Clair took the time out to discover whether gingerbread tins are watertight or not...
They are not.
German efficiency indeed.
OK, so by this stage, it was becoming dire.
We had placed a couple of phone calls to our partners to find out what was going on up ahead.
All they knew was that the road was closed and that they couldn't say when it would be re-opened.
No good waiting until it grew dark to pee either - it was only 4 o'clock and Clair really didn't seem to have 10 minutes in her, let alone 6 hours.
We hastily assessed every other possible vessel for seaworthiness with no luck.
For a few seconds there, we both believed that she could just refill that damned water bottle...
As preparations for this event proceeded, Clair made me promise that if she peed in a container in my car, then so would I.
Like blood sisters.
About now she had one twinge too many. She turned around in her seat, rifled through all the stuff on the backseat of my comparatively roomy yet small 2 door car, discovered her long, flat plastic storage container with her cross stitch in it and made a decision.
Turf the precise, painstaking work of 4 years out onto the seat and piss in the Goddamn thing!
Now, Clair's taller than me by quite a bit. I'm saying she'd be 5'10 slouching. Maybe more.
I'm also saying that the distance between the top of that container and the roof of my car is a lot less than that.
Next time you dearly need to pee, see if you can do it all scrunched up, off balance and laughing.
Pissing yourself laughing, no less.
If you can also take the time out from your embarrassed (I still don't know why), contorted hysterics to remember and apologise for your B group vitamins yuo had this morning, then you're in the vicinity of Clair's experience.
I think she'd even unwrapped a pad in the hope of mopping it up and reducing splash back, but with little effect.
Now, all the commotion of a full grown woman jumping into the backseat, sitting with her head pressed up against the roof, laughing and then climbing back into the front seat, had obviously attracted the attention of, well, everyone around us in that jam.
And then it was my turn.
"You promised!" she begged me.
OFFS
I certainly did need to pee, but it wasn't a desperate need.
But I thought it would make for a good anecdote and it would antidote Clair's embarrassment.
Even so, I could see no way that I was going to be able to manage this feat in the tight jeans I had chosen to wear that day.
No way at all.
Helpfully, Clair bounded out of the car with all the joy of a person newly relieved and fossicked through my luggage for a hippy skirt I'd brought along.
Then I got changed in the driver's seat as people walked by and while the man in the car behind us watched on.
Not having attracted enough attention already, I now had to crawl over the seats as Clair jumped into the driver's eat in case we had to go.
Negotiating a long flat container and negotiating a long flat container full of piss, is quite different of course.
And hitching up your skirt, trying to fit over it without knocking it over, and trying to look as though you're not shaping up to piss, and try to stop laughing long enough to actually do the piss itself, although simple enough individual tasks, are really farken difficult when you do them all together.
Throw into this mix the fact that the pad got caught in my stream and completely ruined any chance I had of sanity as it moved around in the piss like a ferry in a nasty storm.
But of course it was at this very moment, when I was struggling to catch my breath long enough to tell Clair about the pad, that we started to move.
I made it maybe 100 metres on my throne before I just cut the exercise short, dipped my skirt in urine, got splashed due to braking, pulled up, readjusted whatever I could and climbed back into the front seat just in time to be ushered onto the emergency exit and the real world again.
Mercifully we had a lid for that container.
You may imagine Jeff's surprise when he met us at the garage upon our return and helped us to unload the car.
Clair and I both now keep soft, folding dog water bowls in our glove boxes.
No comments:
Post a Comment